Tony Plate <Tony.Plate@mcs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> Z. Todd Taylor writes:
> >
> > 1) Arcane is only bad if the oddities are gratuitous. What
> > makes S arcane is what makes it powerful.
>
> In general, I'd agree, but not with everything.
> I'd argue that the variable scoping laws are
> arcane and subtract power. The way dataframes are stored in
> models as a name (and formulas too, from memory), combined
> with the fact that functions cannot easily access variables in
> intermediate higher frames, makes it very cumbersome to write
> some functions which call modeling functions.
Agreed.
> And I'm not sure if "arcane" is sufficiently negative to
> describe S+'s garbage collection (or lack thereof) and
> the resulting necessity for things like the For() function.
Agreed. This is where I'd like to see some S development focus.
> It's interesting to note that the R language, while based
> on S, differs in these two respects.
Yes. R's scoping is great. Its memory problem is worse,
though, at least for certain kinds of very large datasets.
--Todd
--
Z. Todd Taylor
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Todd.Taylor@pnl.gov
Why don't stranger and anger rhyme?
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